Sri Lanka Attacks: What We Know and Don’t Know

Mourners at a mass burial on Wednesday near St. Sebastian’s Church in Negombo, Sri Lanka. More than 100 people were killed at the church on Sunday.CreditCreditAdam Dean for The New York Times

By The New York Times

April 24, 2019

The investigation into the bombings on Sunday in Sri Lanka that killed more than 250 people entered a fourth day on Wednesday. Information continues to emerge, while some basic questions remain unanswered.

What we know about the investigation

• Indian intelligence officials warned their Sri Lankan counterparts of the attack just hours before the first bomb was detonated, but the Sri Lankans failed to act. It was the last in a series of unheeded alerts, including an April 4 warning and an April 11 intelligence memo that warned of attacks on churches and named the plotters.

• As anger mounted over the intelligence failures, one lawmaker, Wijedasa Rajapakse, called on Wednesday for the arrest and prosecution of two top security officials, and President Maithripala Sirisena asked the two officials to resign. In a letter to Mr. Sirisena, Mr. Rajapakse said that Hemasiri Fernando, the defense secretary, and Pujith Jayasundara, the inspector general of police, “hid these facts from you and the prime minister,” and urged the president to “arrest them and bring the full force of the law to bear against them.”

• The suicide bombers who struck churches and hotels were all well-educated, middle-class Sri Lankans, officials said on Wednesday. Some had been educated overseas, including one who was an undergraduate at a university in Britain and went to graduate school in Australia. The officials said nine bombers blew themselves up — eight men and one woman — including the man described as the leader of the homegrown, militant Islamist group said to have carried out the attack.

• There is a danger of more bombings, officials have warned, as the police continue to find explosives. The American ambassador said investigators believed there were “ongoing terrorist plots,” and Sri Lankan officials have said they are still searching for people believed to be linked to the attacks.

• Sixty people have been arrested in connection with the attacks on Easter Sunday, Ruwan Wijewardene, the country’s state minister of defense, said on Wednesday.

• More than 250 people were killed, including at least 45 children, and about 500 were wounded. The victims came from more than a dozen countries, and included people worshiping at Easter services.

• Sri Lankan officials said on Tuesday that the bombings may have been in retaliation for attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March. On Wednesday, a government minister and former army chief said planning may have been underway for several years.

• The United States Embassy confirmed that agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation were in Sri Lanka to assist.

What we know about who was killed and where

• At least 250 people were killed. Unicef, the United Nations children agency, said at least 45 of those killed were children.

• The attacks took place at three churches and three hotels on Easter morning in three separate cities across the island. Two more explosions happened in the afternoon in and around Colombo, one at a small guesthouse and the other at what was the suspects’ apparent safe house. Three officers searching for the attackers were killed in that blast.

• The deadliest explosion was at St. Sebastian’s Church in Negombo, about 20 miles north of Colombo, where more than 100 were killed.

• At least 28 people were killed at the Zion Church in Batticaloa, on the other side of the island on its eastern coast. St. Anthony’s Shrine, a Roman Catholic church in Colombo, was also attacked, with an unknown number of dead. Witnesses described “a river of blood” there.

• The three hotels attacked, all in Colombo, were the Shangri-La, the Cinnamon Grand and the Kingsbury.

• People from more than a dozen foreign countries were killed, along with many Sri Lankans. Several of the victims were Americans, the authorities said. Others were Australian, British, Chinese, Dutch, Indian, Portuguese, Japanese and Turkish citizens, according to officials and news reports.

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Listen to ‘The Daily’: The Terrorist Attacks in Sri Lanka

Suicide bombings across the country killed hundreds of people. Top officials had been repeatedly warned of the threat.

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Listen to ‘The Daily’: The Terrorist Attacks in Sri Lanka

Hosted by Michael Barbaro; produced by Rachel Quester, Eric Krupke and Alexandra Leigh Young, with help from Annie Brown; and edited by Lisa Tobin

Suicide bombings across the country killed hundreds of people. Top officials had been repeatedly warned of the threat.

michael barbaro

From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.” Today: A series of highly coordinated bombings has left more than 300 dead in Sri Lanka. How did a small, obscure and underfinanced local group carry out one of the deadliest terror attacks since 9/11? It’s Wednesday, April 24. Jeffrey Gettleman, take me back to a year ago in Sri Lanka. What was going on in the government there?

jeffrey gettleman

The Sri Lankan government was in complete meltdown. Sri Lanka is a developing country, somewhat isolated. It’s an island off of India. And for years, it’s struggled with a very brutal civil war that ended about 10 years ago. So we are now witnessing the rebirth of this country after decades of bloodshed and dysfunction and confusion and chaos. And the government is a symptom of all these problems.

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A political crisis in Sri Lanka, where the president has sacked the country’s entire Parliament and called for fresh elections.

jeffrey gettleman

You have a division at the highest levels between the president and the prime minister. They were disputing who was in control.

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The president is accused of violating the Constitution after he fired the prime minister and appointed a replacement.

jeffrey gettleman

And the president then appointed another person to become a new prime minister.

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He replaced him with Mahinda Rajapaksa, an ex-president accused of war crimes.

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The country’s largest party has called the president a tyrant.

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The prime minister, they say, should be chosen by Parliament, not the president.

jeffrey gettleman

It provoked a constitutional crisis with lawmakers threatening to quit.

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Police have been called into Sri Lanka’s Parliament after M.P.s flung books, chairs and water to stop a no-confidence motion.

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Tempers boiled over following discussions over who should lead the country.

And it all stemmed from this very bitter rivalry between the president and the prime minister, which still hasn’t been resolved.

michael barbaro

And throughout this turmoil that you’re describing over the past year, what is happening simultaneously in Sri Lanka?

jeffrey gettleman

Well, around the same time in December last year, when this political meltdown was still a big issue here, and the government was dysfunctional, police officials in a small town in central Sri Lanka learned about a mysterious preacher who had been indoctrinating young Muslim students and encouraging them to attack Buddhists and Buddhist statues. They didn’t know much about this guy. He was said to be a traveling preacher who had been run out of his own village because his views were too radical and hateful, and he had been told to leave. And ever since then, he had been traveling back and forth between India and Sri Lanka, spreading these very hateful messages that Muslims are the only ones who deserve to be on Earth, that Muslims have the right to kill anybody who’s not Muslim, and that anybody who’s concerned about these issues should really take action and strike out against infidels. The Sri Lankan government doesn’t really take it seriously. And at the same time, the Indian government, which has a pretty extensive intelligence network across South Asia and is constantly on the lookout for the rise of Islamic groups, learns about this guy. And then, in early April, India reaches out to Sri Lanka and says they have specific information: Mohammed Zaharan and his followers are planning suicide attacks across Sri Lanka at churches. The Indians give the Sri Lankans very detailed information — the whereabouts of these people, their cell phone numbers, social media information, addresses, names, aliases. And the Sri Lankans then process the information and put together a security memo that they circulate among only a few assistant police chiefs. And this memo was dated April 11, and it says, foreign intelligence agencies have given us information that Mohammed Zaharan is planning suicide attacks against Catholic churches in Sri Lanka. But no action is taken.

michael barbaro

How can that be possible, that they’re not taking any action?

jeffrey gettleman

Some people believe it goes back to this political division at the heart of the government, that the president is so intent on shutting out the prime minister from any security matters that he’s hoarding all this information to himself and not really doing anything with it. The suspects who are named in the memo are not arrested. No security is added at churches, and life goes on, until April 21. At about 8:45 a.m. Easter Sunday, bombs explode at several churches and hotels across Sri Lanka.

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The story we’re following — state media in Sri Lanka report three explosions were at hotels. Three other explosions were at churches. And keep this in mind —

jeffrey gettleman

I was actually in New Delhi, and I got a message that a few explosions had been heard and several people were injured. Over the next couple hours, we find out that dozens of people have been killed.

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The information is still coming through, but the information that we have points to a devastating series of what looks like a series of coordinated attacks.

jeffrey gettleman

By the time I bought my plane tickets and was en route to Sri Lanka, the death toll was nearly 200 people. It kept rising day by day, and is now more than 320 people.

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This is the worst violence in Sri Lanka in more than 10 years, since the end of the civil war there.

jeffrey gettleman

And the people who were killed were worshippers, many children, several dozen foreign tourists. Sri Lanka has a large tourism industry. And there were Americans, British, Australians, Indians, Chinese, Turkish all killed in these attacks.

michael barbaro

And how do Sri Lankan officials respond to the attack early on?

jeffrey gettleman

So within hours, they arrest dozens of suspects. They sweep through the city, Colombo, the capital, find a safe house with weapons in it, announce that they have arrested accomplices to the attackers. And that raised questions, because it looked like they had known who was behind the attack from the beginning. And shortly after that, one minister in the government leaks this secret memo dated April 11 that says there was an imminent terrorist attack against Catholic churches in the works. And the anger begins to build that the government should have arrested these people and fortified the churches before Easter Sunday if they had suspected that there might be some attacks.

michael barbaro

And what are the big questions that reporters like you are trying to answer at this moment?

jeffrey gettleman

So I was very confused how a local group that nobody’s heard of could have accomplished such a devastating series of attacks. I have covered suicide bombings in other places, like Somalia and Iraq, and I have seen the horror of people blown apart and buildings blown apart by very powerful explosives. And that’s what this looked like. There were six bombs that went off within minutes of each other, and each was incredibly powerful. To build a bomb like that is complicated. To pack explosives into a small, carryable package and detonate it effectively in a closed space is the mark of a sophisticated terrorist organization. They had to have a foreign partner in this. They had to have tapped into some international terror network and received expertise or manpower or weapons to be able to do this, because there was no history in Sri Lanka of anything close to this scale. And the selection of the targets — to go after churches on Easter seemed such a spectacular crime against non-Muslims that it just made you wonder what group out there would have an agenda like that. There really wasn’t a local motivation to do that. There had been no history of bloodshed between Muslims and Christians in Sri Lanka. So it raised the question of what group outside this country would want to use this country to make a broader point. And that’s when I started thinking about the Islamic State.

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CNN has just learned that ISIS is now claiming responsibility for the coordinated Easter Sunday bombings.

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The Islamic State says it was behind the multiple suicide blasts, although it’s not offered any proof.

michael barbaro

And when do we learn more about ISIS’s involvement?

jeffrey gettleman

It was only into the third day of covering the story around the clock, hour after hour, that we begin to hear of an Islamic State connection. On Tuesday morning, we hear that the Islamic State has claimed this attack. That’s not proof in itself, because of course the Islamic State is going to want to take credit for one of the most devastating terrorist attacks against Christians or non-Muslims in recent years. That was not proof in itself. But by Tuesday night, the Islamic State released a video —

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jeffrey gettleman

— of Mohammed Zaharan posing with a weapon in front of a black Islamic State flag next to seven men whose faces are covered. And in the video, he makes a pledge of allegiance to the Islamic State. And that basically clinches the connection between this little, unknown group and one of the world’s deadliest terror organizations.

michael barbaro

Jeffrey, did the Sri Lankan government know about this seeming involvement of ISIS ahead of time when they were getting all those warnings? Was that in any of those notifications that they were getting beforehand?

jeffrey gettleman

There was nothing that we knew before today that showed the Sri Lankan government knew there was a Islamic State connection to this group. In that very detailed memo that lays out the names and addresses and phone numbers, there was no mention of the Islamic State. And the argument is that even if that was the case, the security agencies should have still looked more closely into it, because they had detailed information from a credible partner, which is the Indian government. So that’s what’s so frustrating, is that people in this country had very detailed information about what this group was planning. The mistake was nobody thought they were capable of doing it.

michael barbaro

Mm-hmm. So I wonder — what does it tell us that this small, local, not well-financed, not-all-that-seriously-taken group was able to be harnessed the way it was by ISIS?

jeffrey gettleman

I think it shows that there can be a partnership between any radical group, however much you discount them as inexperienced, under-resourced, not that threatening, eccentric. If they team up with the Islamic State or a global terror network, they can become incredibly dangerous. And the fact that they’re underestimated and dismissed and ignored is an advantage, because then they’re able to set a plot like this in motion without a lot of scrutiny or harassment. But there’s something else that was still really perplexing, which is, what does it mean to be connected to the Islamic State? So these guys here pledged allegiance to this greater jihadist philosophy, but did they get training by the Islamic State? Did they send people to Syria? Did the Islamic State send people here? Did they help them bring in the explosives? How closely were the two sides working together? We still don’t know that. And who initiated contact? Was it Mohammed Zaharan who reached out to them and said, I really need your help to accomplish this mission inside Sri Lanka? Or did the Islamic State spot an opportunity and maybe see some of his videos online and think, hmm, Sri Lanka’s a pretty soft target. If we want to kill a lot of people, that’s a great place to do it. And maybe they cultivated him and used him to accomplish their agenda. This is the type of stuff that we’re trying to figure out, and it’s a huge investigation. The American government has just sent F.B.I. agents here to help. There’s lots of foreign intelligence interest in this incident because of the high death toll and the way that these attacks unfolded. And it raises a question of how dangerous these homegrown groups can be. Because here was one that nobody was watching, and it pulled off one of the most devastating, horrific terrorist episodes of recent times.

michael barbaro

And it feels, at the end of the day, like this is bigger than whatever decisions were being made by the Sri Lankan government. This is about an international terror group looking for local partners in ways that lots of small governments don’t seem to understand.

jeffrey gettleman

Yes, but local governments have to deal with these issues on the ground. There’s no international Islamic State equivalent to fight terrorist groups. These issues are handled on the ground. Some of the news that came out on Tuesday was that the cardinal of Sri Lanka’s Catholic community was furious at the security forces and said, if you guys had told me there were threats against churches on Easter Sunday, I would have told people to stay home. But he wasn’t given that information.

michael barbaro

And why is the F.B.I. involved here, Jeffrey?

jeffrey gettleman

There were a few Americans killed in the attacks. That is a concern to the American government, and therefore they have some jurisdiction and reason to be here. But it’s much bigger than that. What happened here in Sri Lanka is a very alarming sign for the rest of the world of how to co-opt a local group that has very little resources and a pretty low profile to commit mass murder. How did this group evolve relatively quickly from the same one that was defacing statues, and little more than that, to a group that could blow up churches across the country within minutes of each other and kill 300 or more people? I think they see this as an important case to work on because it has these bigger ramifications.

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jeffrey gettleman

It’s the idea that the Islamic State, which has been defeated on the ground and lost a lot of territory, is still a very powerful virtual force. It can still indoctrinate people and encourage people and support people to do these horrific crimes. Whether it has a town or a region in the Middle East that it controls or not, it’s still a deadly force. That’s what we all want to figure out, is how exactly did these two groups work together to carry this out. And I think if we know that, it will help us understand how these groups pull off attacks like this. And the idea is the better you understand that, the better chance you have of preventing the next one.

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michael barbaro

Jeffrey, thank you very much. We appreciate it.

jeffrey gettleman

I’m glad to help. Thanks.

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michael barbaro

On Tuesday, mass funerals began for the victims of Sunday’s attacks in Sri Lanka. Outside of one of the targeted churches, priests held back-to-back ceremonies in a large tent, several of them for small children. A few hours later, in a televised speech, Sri Lanka’s president acknowledged his government’s failure to detect the terror attacks beforehand and vowed to dismiss aides who had failed to act on the warnings. We’ll be right back.

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michael barbaro

Here’s what else you need to know today.

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Today we announced the first ever drug trafficking charges against a pharmaceutical company and two of its executives for illegally distributing prescription drugs that helped fuel the opioid epidemic.

michael barbaro

On Tuesday, for the first time, federal authorities brought charges against a major pharmaceutical distributor and its executives that are usually reserved for street dealers and cartel leaders. The distributor, Rochester Drug Cooperative, was charged with felony drug trafficking for its role in spreading the deadly opioid epidemic by failing to report suspicious drug orders from pharmacies.

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From 2012 to 2017, it shipped tens of millions of highly addictive oxycodone pills and fentanyl products to pharmacies that it knew were illegally dispensing narcotics.

michael barbaro

As a result, Rochester Drug Cooperative, the sixth-largest drug distributor in the country, will pay a fine of $20 million and submit to five years of supervision by an independent monitor.

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During the period alleged in the indictment, R.D.C. generated $1.2 billion of revenues from the sale of controlled substances. Why did they do it? The answer is greed.

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michael barbaro

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.

What we don’t know about the attacks

• Sri Lankan officials have yet to confirm if the so-called leader killed in the attack was Mohamad Zaharan, the radical Muslim lecturer mentioned in a security memo as the head of National Thowheeth Jama’ath, which is believed to have organized the bombings.